In todays patent troll news Sony is being sued over the cell processor. The patent Sony is alleged to have infringed is here. Why is Parallel Processing a patent troll? Simple: Parallel Processing, or more precisely Rob Chang to whom the patent was issued, has contributed little or nothing of social value. Read the patent: does it help you build a parallel processor? No. The basic ideas underlying parallel processing have been known for decades; the devil is in the details - which types of decentralization of processing and memory work well under practical conditions and with particular hardware. The Sony Cell is the product of a few cheap ideas and a lot of expensive tinkering. There is no evidence Rob Chang or Parallel Processing contributed to this process. So they have no moral or economic claim on Sony. And since they lack moral claim and are trying to file a financial claim that makes them trolls.

The sad thing is - it wouldn't be that hard to improve the patent system to get rid of this type of claim. Just force patent holders to provide evidence of having contributed in a substantial way to product they are claiming belongs to them.

An elaborate compromise patent bill has cleared the house judiciary commitee. I am dubious that it will make much difference, although by making it harder to get and easier to challenge patents it may be a step in the right direction. Abolishing software patents all together would be a much better step.

(via Jeff Ely) An absolutely hilarious article on CNN about the musician formerly known as Prince giving away his new CD as part of a newspaper promotion. Are you surprised that the industry - whose business model can only be described as threatened by this - is furious?

This is my favorite part of the article:

Also fueling retailers' ire is what they see as a traitorous move by one of their own. After initially harshly criticizing Prince and the deal, music and books retailer HMV, which doesn't normally sell newspapers, decided to sell the Mail on Sunday in its 400-plus stores across the country.

"Like it or not, selling the newspaper is the only way to make the Prince album available to our customers," HMV said.

Rival retailers were outraged.

"We're stunned that HMV has decided to take what appears to be a complete U-turn on their stance," said Simon Douglas, managing director of retail at Virgin Megastores. "It's not only retailers that suffer; the public will suffer in the long term by restricting choice on the high street."

There is a nice blog Recording Industry Versus the People tracking the RIAA's warfare against their customers. It is sad reading. Most interesting is that a few people are starting to strike back by countersuing. Based on their complaints, it appears that the RIAA feels that the law is only for other people, not for themselves. Perhaps the courts will begin to function as they are intended, rather than as the long arm of the "music police."

I'm leaving for Europe shortly, so don't have time for a long post, but there is a lot of news, so I'm going to put up a few links - check Slashdot, they are following these stories

Peer Patent Review: Looks like the voluntary patent peer review is underway for real. You may recall I've had some skepticism of this, but now we will see.

Secondary Copyright: I think this is a good thing: a court has given publishers that buy material from freelancers more control over the content, allowing them to use the material electronically without separate royalty payments. But I just looked at it briefly.

Maybe some of our readers can fill us in on what is going on with some of these developments.

One of the key questions with copyright is whether and how creators can profit without it. The economic argument against copyright isn't that creators should work from the kindness of their hearts, but rather that there are economic incentives to produce new creations even without copyright, and these incentives are strong enough that there will be little loss in creativity if copyright were to be abolished.

A key empirical question is to what extent goods that are in short supply are substitutes or complements for things that are not in so short supply. For example, if electronic copies of music trade widely at a very low price, they may generate little revenue for musicians. On the other hand, it they are complementary to live music (and they are) then the "freebie" recordings raise the demand for live performances. So a perfectly reasonable business model in music is to give the recording away for free, and sell the live performances. In the free software industry, copies are cheap or free, but generate demand for (are complements of) services which are not.

What about books? One of the concerns of the publishing industry is that if free or cheap electronic copies become widely available revenue for authors will dry up. (Well that is a concern of authors, anyway.) In other words, are electronic copies substitutes for printed copies? In the long term, portable computers may replace printed books, so this is probably true. But it is far from true today. John Bennett draws our attention to an article by Tim O'Reilly that provides hard data on sales and downloads of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, by Leif Madsen, Jared Smith, and Jim Van Meggelen, which was released for free download under a creative commons license. The article has quite a bit of information. Typically books sales spike when it is released then decline gradually - in our own research we find most sales occuring in the initial six months after release. The article has only two books to compare, but it seems as if the free download had little impact on sales, at worst causing sales to decline slightly faster. So at the moment at least it appears that elecronic copies are neither complements or substitutes for the printed version, but rather are neutral.

We'll get to slavery at the end of this post. I want to highlight some of the good guys for a change. The Open Knowledge Foundation - well the name pretty much describes it. It came to my attention through Rufus Pollock, who is a Ph.D student at Cambridge (England) doing research on cumulative innovation. Rufus has been active in Europe with several important organizations: the FFII, the major grass-roots organization lobbying against software patents in the EU - we've dodged the bullet on that one so far, as well as being involved with the UK Creative Commons.

So what does this have to do with slavery? You may recall that while not as pernicious as slavery, the mind-control aspect of intellectual property has many of the same problems as slavery - a form of property that has always been opposed by economists. One of the most interesting posts on the Open Knowledge Foundation website is the post about data on the slave trade: which is itself enslaved in chains of intellectual property.

(via slashdot) The Slingbox is a device that can shift a television broadcast from one location to another. Major League Baseball is declaring this illegal. According to Sling Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronic Assocation, representing a large number of small (and innovative) manufacturers disagrees:

The Consumer Electronics Association agrees with Blake, and seems to be siding with Sling Media and consumers on the issue. "This is a classic instance of copyright owners trying to suppress innovation purely because it empowers consumers," says CEA President Gary Shapiro." There is no infringement or piracy here--consumers are simply watching content they lawfully purchase..."

This might be a good place to put in a plug for Gary and the CEA who are fighting hard to see that modern technology reaches the consumer and is not blocked by the copyfight.

Elaborating on Crosbie's comment: I also saw the Helprin op-ed this morning, courtesy of Bill Zame who sent me the link. Helprin confuses a gift granted him by the government with that which he earned by the sweat of his brow. A house you build with the sweat of your brow. Helprin's great masterpieces such as Memoir From Antproof Case he also built with the sweat of his brow. Suppose for the sake of argument that I had purchased a copy (for obvious reasons I have not). Then what right does Helprin have to tell me how I can use my copy? If he built a house and sold it to me, would that give him the right to tell me how to use it? Make no mistake, intellectual property is not about property, it is about monopoly. What Helprin wants is not the right to own his work in perpetuity - that right he already has. What Helprin wants it the right to monopolize his work in perpetuity - and that is a gift given him by the government that is not given to builders of houses, flour mills, travel agencies or newspapers.

Mark: nobody is forcing you to sell your great masterpieces. But if you sell them, stop trying to tell us what to do with our copies of them.

via Slashdot. The U.S. Supreme Court - about which we have often been critical on this blog - came through in a big way today. The Circuit Court - which is notorious for its lax standards in determining whether a patent is valid - had the test it uses for "obviousness" overruled.

"Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.

A brief account can be found here. Note that the companies arguing against the Circuit court are the ones that innovate; those arguing with the Circuit court are those that don't. This alone should say something about the state of patent law. Hopefully the ruling will cut down on the vast number of frivolous and/or blackmail patent lawsuits. The article doesn't mention this, but the ruling was unanimous, which is good news as well.

There was also a useful but unrelated ruling cutting down on the use of lawsuits on exports.